Working Animal Welfare: Seeking Sustainable Solutions

In developing countries, working horses, donkeys, and mules are most often used for heavy labor, whether it be hauling heavy loads of cargo or carrying tourists up and down a mountain.

The animals might be suffering from malnourishment, dehydration, disease, lameness, or injury. Rest and recovery is often not a practical option. The animals have no choice but to continue working despite poor environmental or health conditions, as the livelihoods of their impoverished owners depend on the steady work they do.

Charlotte Burn, MSc, DPhil, of The Royal Veterinary College, together with The University of Bristol and The Brooke Hospital for Animals, UK, has been studying the welfare of working equines. Burn recently shared some of her research results in the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare Animal Behaviour and Welfare Seminar Series.

The good news is that many of the welfare problems faced by working equines are treatable and even preventable. This is where Burn's work comes in. Her aim is to identify practical, sustainable solutions and interventions to the various problems, assess their effectiveness, and ultimately have the best solutions applied by equine owners themselves.

Burn and her colleagues conducted a survey of 10,843 equines in Ethiopia, the Gambia, Kenya, and Guatemala. She found that 85% could be classified as thin or very thin. The thinner animals were also lamer, and had more wounds and a greater incidence of diarrhea; 63% of animals had wounds, with one quarter of these being deep enough to expose the muscle layer, or even the tendons and bones; 97% of animals had abnormal gaits.

All of these results indicate serious and ongoing welfare challenges that need addressing. One particular study was aimed at addressing a problem noted in tourist donkeys in Petra. These donkeys carry people up and down a mountain-side by saddle, the strap of which wraps under the base of their tails, sometimes rubbing away the skin and causing raw wounds. Burn surveyed the donkeys, and found tail-base lesions in 73% of 86 donkeys studied. She also found that dirty straps and straps padded with cotton or fleece made the problem worse. Simply using clean, synthetic straps and eliminating padding altogether is a realistic, sustainable intervention in this case.

Burn was also curious to know if equine behavior could be used as a field indicator of physical welfare. She looked at a variety of behaviors, and found unresponsiveness and apathy to be associated with thinness, lesions, pale mucus membranes, diarrhea, old age, parasites, lameness, eye abnormalities, and missing teeth.

Thus, this behavior can be considered a good first indicator of health conditions that are likely painful, or that might contribute to weakness and exhaustion. Such information can assist veterinarians in making quick judgments about animals in need of further assessment and possibly immediate care and intervention.

The results generated from studies such as these can be readily applied in field conditions to immediately improve the lives of working equines. Burn says a key to success is community participation in animal health and welfare initiatives. Two-way exchange of ideas, understanding community priorities, giving participants ownership of ideas, and providing expert feedback on efficacy all ensure the most successful outcome for the animals.

Burn continues to work with the University of Bristol and the Brooke Hospital toward reducing suffering of working equines.--Kimberly Sheppard